Minorities push us in the right direction. They do so when they set out to instigate social, political, religious, scientific and artistic changes. They challenge the status quo and offer an alternative that the majority then adheres to.
A single person, a small group of nonconformists, can spark a global civic movement. History is full of examples. Perhaps the most significant of our era is that of the scientists who first warned of the climate crisis. They were discredited, but they were right and today almost all states try to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
There is no progress without quixotes, without people who stand up and attack the windmills. The Nobel Peace Prize committee has awarded quite a few. Iranian engineer Narges Mohamadi is this year's laureate. She is serving a long sentence for defending the right of women to think for themselves and decide how they dress, for being at the forefront of a peaceful and momentous uprising, the greatest challenge the Islamic republic has had to face since its proclamation. in 1979.
Dissidents are always brave and minority. It is not easy to move against the current, risk your life and, if the opportunity arises, leave your country to live in exile. More than a million Russians have left since February 2022 and last year more than 300,000 young Chinese also left never to return. The exodus is accelerating due to the intransigence and repression of the authoritarian elites. Refugees, those fleeing wars, crowd the borders of Europe and the United States. They are the future.
But the future does not arrive by itself. The future is imposed. It is the result of a fight between minorities. One advances and another resists. Between the two, the silent majority watches and awaits its moment. Decide or let yourself go.
The guardians of the Iranian revolution are not so different from the guardians of the elites in a democracy. Both try to preserve their preeminence.
The white, rural and conservative minority in the United States, for example, tries to maintain a hegemony that it is about to lose, and resists protected by a system that favors it, by an anti-majoritarian democracy.
The United States House of Representatives has 435 seats and this week eight Republican deputies were enough to remove the speaker, a Republican like them and the third most important position in the country.
The ultimate reason for this rebellion is not to contain public spending as has been argued, but to maintain the privileges of the white, religious and conservative minority in the face of the multiracial, secular and urban majority that is denied fair political representation.
The Senate is undemocratic and has great power. California, the most populous state, with almost 40 million inhabitants, has two seats, while the 20 smaller states, with a similar population, have 40. The Republican majority in the Senate received 13 million fewer votes in the last elections. than the Democratic minority.
Donald Trump, who was president without winning the popular vote, appointed more than 200 federal judges and three Supreme Court justices with the help of a Senate that does not represent the majority of citizens. The positions are for life. That is, the judicial elite, those responsible for resolving cases at the penultimate rung of the judiciary, are conservative and will be for decades.
The elites cannot be better protected because changing the Constitution is almost impossible. A two-thirds majority is needed in the Senate and the House of Representatives, in addition to ratification by 38 of the 50 states of the Union.
The Constitution is a burden that sinks American democracy. Millions of citizens have risen up against it in movements such as
Minorities push us in the wrong direction when they are elitist and set the rules of the game. It is not worth appealing to enlightened despotism. To accept it is to camouflage their immobility and justify their fear of the loss of national identity.
Minorities are transformative when they join other minorities and together they form a new majority, a new balance, fairer because it is more between equals.
There is nothing more unfair in a parliamentary system than an absolute majority because there is no government of the future that is not for everyone, and there is nothing sadder than being in the hands of political leaders who do not speak to each other, incapable of reaching the agreements that the society claims.
Society is always ahead of politics because it has quixotes engaged in a thousand altruistic causes who are not afraid of prison, torture and death, as is the case of Narges Mohamadi, an inmate in the infamous Evin prison, in the northern suburbs of Tehran, and of so many other prisoners of conscience around the world. Gandhi and Mandela show them the way.
To those who asked him how to resist, the Mahatma explained that “first they ignore you, then they mock you, then they fight you and then you win.”
